motherglitch uses older AI models with their characteristic glitches and artifacts to capture a specific moment in artificial intelligence's evolution, when the technology's limitations were more visible - and more honest about their inability to fully represent human experience.

Where my broader MOTHER series (https://verse.works/series/mother-by-danielle-king) interrogates contemporary AI's polished but problematic interpretations, motherglitch examines the beauty found in technological failure. I turned to older AI models - the ones that glitch and fracture, that can't quite hold an image together - because they reminded me of early motherhood. Those systems struggled to render what I asked of them, just as I struggled to recognize myself in the mirror. Bodies separate into chromatic layers because motherhood does split you into pieces. Scan lines run through domestic scenes like the constant interruptions of maternal life.

I wanted to preserve these moments before technology learned to hide its seams, before it got better at lying about how difficult it is to hold the complexity of a mother in a single frame. These glitches - the errors, the breakdowns, the moments where the system simply gives up trying to make it pretty – are closer to the real lived experience of motherhood than any perfect image could ever be.

artist: Danielle King | medium: 3072 x 3072 PNG | minted October 15, 2025 for the Art on Tezos: Berlin exhibition "Soft Error," curated by Von Doyle and hosted by ACCOMPARTS, November 6-8, 2025, Berlin, Germany